... and I cant sleep. So I thought to do something usefull:

I've asked Targhan to create two new bounties.
What do you think ?

Improved default icons in Ambient

Goal: Improve the default icon support
in Ambient to a usefull state.

Requirements:
- Preferences Editor that can assign
an icon and one or more actions to perform
on a doubleclicked file.
- A menu for each file with its actions added
to it's popup menu.
- Filetype recognition by header and
an editor to add/change headers and a "smart"
learning by passing sample files.
(Like whatis.library, or even better like Opus Magellan)


Archivesupport in Ambient

Goal: Make archives accessible as if they
were directories in Ambient

Requirements:
- Add support for displaying/handling archives
to Ambient as if they were directories.
- Add an entry to compress a directory to each directory popupmenu.
- Support if possible all archivetypes (fex XAD.library).
Minimum requirement is: lha,zip,tar.gz,tar.bz


[ Edited by Robin on 2005/9/13 5:25 ]

Go for it mate! One thing I like in Windows/WinRAR is the ability to extract archives easily ... "Extract to..." and "Extract here" are lifesavers. Something like that would be a very welcome addon to Ambient.

And filetype recognition .. well, I think people have asked it for what, a couple years now?

I think filetypes recongition should become a centralized system at last. There is something which can be considered to be pre-prototype - Vapor MIME prefs. But this system only specifies viewers, it has nothing to do with recognition. But this prefs file can be adopted i think, only recognition stuff should be added. This would give direct compatibility with most of existing Internet apps.
There's an excellent concept called "datatypes", i wonder why it has so limited use. Probably there should be some map file between MIME type and Amiga datatype? Of course such a system should include an editor capable of autocreation of datatype recognizers, but AFAIK this is possible.

Hi there,

Kiero is already codeing filetype recognition into Ambient - basic picture recognition is already in the last few Ambient versions available.

This isn't to say that a bounty is not a good idea (it will persuade him to shift into a higher gear! :) but i just thought I'd point this out to you...:)

Bifford

Let's hope Kiero is not too busy with porting
games and considers taking this bounty
As he is one of the most active coders his time is probably
a little limited

Gyaaah, I can't believe that I forgot to put this bounty up last night...

Context menus and file types recognition stuff is partially implemented in kiero's private version. It is not commited into cvs yet because of incompleteness. I think it could be done some time ago if not bunch of projects kiero involved in.

@Bifford

The "basic picture recognition" (also sound file and text + the related builtin viewers) was made by zapek before he opensourced ambient.

I think before making a final approval of such a project that we need some kind of official word from the morphos-team on the subject. This is awful close to what is supposed to be in MorphOS 1.5, and I think it would affect what support could be obtained through donations etc.

Another thought is, how about just a simple re-implimentation of deficons, with a simple U/I that could be a smaller project that may be re-used in some other way later on (maybe as a way to specify viewers on top of a basic ambient preference (i.e., pics default to multiview, but deficons can say pic that is .bmp will go to fxpaint or so?)....

@Targhan

Yes, it would be good to hear from morphos-team if this
additions to ambient are helpful or not for the future plans
of morphos.